Microsoft Teams to have real-time noise suppression capability

Soon, you will be able to suppress background noise in real time while communicating with your colleagues via Microsoft Teams. That is one of the multiple features that Microsoft is adding to the cloud-based collaboration and communication platform.

The company announced the upcoming upgrades while marking the third anniversary of Teams. These include:

Noise suppression

The new noise suppression feature in Teams addresses background sounds that make business communication less effective.

We’ve all been in a remote meeting when a participant is loudly typing on their keyboard, or someone is sitting near a vacuum running in the background. Real-time noise suppression helps to minimize distracting background noise, allowing you to hear what’s being said.

Raise hand feature

Raising your hand for a chance to make a contribution in a physical meeting makes sense. But in a video conferencing session with many participants, you may not always get noticed when you do that.

Thankfully, you can now invoke the raise hand feature in Teams when you have something to say in a virtual meeting. The visual signal will appear on the recipients’ screens, indicating that you wish to chime in.

RealWear-Teams integration

Microsoft is collaborating with RealWear to integrate the latter’s head-mounted devices with Teams. Organizations can offer their firstline workers the hands-free gear to enable them to communicate with each other via Teams when it is impractical to use a laptop on the job.

This is not the first time the company is improving Teams to make life in the workplace easier for firstline staff. On January 9, 2020, it announced the incorporation of a push-to-talk service into the collaboration software.

Bookings app

The Bookings app in Teams lets organizations set up appointments with their customers, virtually. The feature could not have come at better time.

For example, it enables doctors to safely engage their patients at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is keeping people indoors.

Other improvements are:

• Support for low-bandwidth and offline communication
• Microsoft 365 Business Voice
• Launching chats into separate windows
• Yealink VC210 support

You will be seeing most of the announced capabilities later this year. Microsoft 365 Business Voice is available in the U.S., though.

Microsoft believes that Teams is vital to the success and growth of Office 365. So it is nice to see the company living up to its conviction by enhancing the utility and inclusivity of the virtual workplace tool.

Based on stats that the company published earlier today, Teams has over 44 million daily users.